The Rules of Backyard Cricket by Jock Serong Page A

to be available to answer the call.
    But that’s him: I was telling you about school.
    History is dull but tolerable. Taught by a small, sad man in avee-neck jumper with thick glasses and a moustache that says I’ve given up.
    English I understand from my years pressed into the crook of Mum’s arm. Melville, Verne, Conrad and Steinbeck. I know stories. What my classmates call my bullshitting—even while they laugh along with it—is just storytelling.
    I have a tale in my head that’s me and Wally and our future and it fits neatly with the contempt I feel for the sat-down life. Every time I relax into the tale, I’m adding chapters—the adulation, the beautiful girls. Centuries in Adelaide and Sydney and walking off the ground to rapturous applause in the golden light of a dying scorcher. Baggy greens on both our heads, lots of trips on planes. The public bar talk of us breaking records, of who’ll get there first. And in my head, it’s always me.
    Hungrier, faster. More fearless. The Keefe brothers, they’re a phenomenon. But that young Darren, he’s just got the edge.
    These are the things I dream about as school starts to slip away from me. The abrasive flats of Sunshine Tech reflect the winter light back at me, day after day.
    Trigonometry brings on the first wave of despair. The zombie groans of sine, cosine and tangent would have chased me out earlier, if not for the intervention of the wonderful Emma Maric: a girl who wears jeans perfectly, who’s got the accessorising swagger to sling her father’s hunting belt round them, the little leather bullet loops vacant as though she’s just emptied a magazine into a rhino.
    Emma Maric understands trig as I never will but has the decency to despise it as I do. Or at least the tactical nous to fake it. When I tell Mum Emma’s coming over to help me with my maths, she looks at me with pity. Really? she says, having looked Emma up and down.
    The effectiveness of these tutorials depends on your point of view. We make progress on trigonometry if Wally and Mum are in thehouse. But if they aren’t, or if they’re preoccupied, we chance it on the bottom bunk, rolling and grunting and mashing our faces together until a desperate glance at her watch or mine forces us to disengage.
    After these sessions we sweep through the dark streets on my ten-speed, Emma dinking on the rack above the rear wheel with her hands on my ribs. Sometimes we pass a quiet joint back and forth and sing to each other, the hedges and fences flying past, startled cat here, possum there. The ten-speed’s got a bell on the handlebars—one of Mum’s weird insistences—and sometimes I just let it rip, over and over, as we careen down the footpath.
    Thinking of them now, they’re all winter nights. Cold air on the face, knuckles burning. One night there’s a hard rubbish collection on the nature strips, and we loop from house to house, sifting through their piles until we find a wood-grain television. We swap seats and I perch on the rack with the TV in my arms as we wobble all the way to her house. In ten minutes we’ve got it working perfectly, and in twenty minutes we’ve forgotten it’s there, twisted in her doona and groping happily with our clothes on the floor.
    And just down the hall from her room, the front door opens.
    By the time the latch has finished clattering and her rhino-shooting old man has called helloo , I’m in the wardrobe and she’s dressed. I can hear her greeting the folks, feigning boredom while I’ve got dry-cleaners plastic pressed against my screaming teenage balls. She boils the kettle for them. Asks them sweetly about their night out. Christ, they’re talking about school.
    At some stage she’s said goodnight and closed the door softly behind herself. I don’t recall it because I’ve fallen asleep in there among the coats. But she’s with me all of a sudden, her soft mouth and the gentle skittering sounds of the hangers.
    Our movements are small and